A mixed bag: no threat to The Once and Future King, but a pleasant enough outing for fans of the hobbit and fairy-tale genre.
A talky addendum to the Arthurian cycle, set ten years after the great king’s death.
McCormack’s Dark Ages are less grittily realistic than the Dark Ages, say, of those other great miners of Arthurian legend, the assembled wits of Monty Python (“How do you know he’s a king?” “Because he hasn’t got shit all over him”). True, Monthy Python worked in a different genre—humor—but, even so, McCormack’s world comes off as a cool and didactic place where people are always informing one another of the eternal and momentary verities: “An Ealdorman is a chieftain, but a Cyning is a ruler over chieftains,” one character helpfully explains to another (the explainer is Gereint, rescued from appearing only as a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle). McCormack’s tale goes thus: After Arthur sails away to Avalon, Britain is a lawless place, beset by Saxon invaders and other pests who have, naturally enough, heard wondrous tales of a thing called the Holy Grail. It’s up to one of Arthur’s junior lieutenants, Budoc, now a hermit, to stop them from befouling Albion with their presence and from making off with any such treasures. With the aid of a few likely and unlikely companions, he does what he can toward that end. That would be all to the good if there were more swords-and-sorcery stuff, or at least a few more martial set pieces to quicken the pace. But, as it is, McCormack’s characters mostly chat among themselves, those old enough remembering the good old days, the younger ones just twittering along. The mood overall is Prince Valiant with a little booze and the occasional breast, together with the requisite oratory (“He serves all things in the Sea-girt Green Space . . . all things in the Honey Isle”), but not quite the requisite amount of blood.
A mixed bag: no threat to The Once and Future King, but a pleasant enough outing for fans of the hobbit and fairy-tale genre.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1494-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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